I cannot speak with any authority about Silicon Valley, where I spent less than a single day, so I cannot say that S.V. has no examples of beauty in small spaces. All I can say that I didn’t see any beautiful small spaces. Still, I think the key differences are these: the value of property and the age of the property. S.V. has lots of space compared to San Francisco. Everyone uses land-extensive landscaping techniques. When property is perceived as really valuable, people make more intensive use of it and use their creativity to enhance what its appearance. The other factor is age. The longer a piece of property has been developed, the more time someone has had to come up with a cool idea of what to do with it. Often, I’d wager, improvements are laid down piece by piece, almost in geological layers. That’s why so many old cities of Europe have so much charm — people have been working on them for centuries!

I’m inspired to bring two of my favorites from Charlottesville, VA, whence I come:

The courtyard behind the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society (enter from the south side of Jefferson Street between 2nd and 3rd Sts. NE). Really, given the footprint of the building and the property line, this amounts to only a few dozen square feet, but they’re nicely laid out and the space features well-planted containers and patches of ground. A lovely place to enjoy a pipe or execute a watercolor or just sit and think for a bit.

The alleyway behind the Teahouse on the Downtown Mall. This alley goes between 4th and 5th Sts. SE, and someone who owns or anyway is responsible for the ground floor of the property nearest 4th has made a lovely small container garden off the alley. The alley proper has no place to sit, but I still find it a nice place through which to walk and for a moment, shake the noise and bustle off of me.

Mr. Bacon– I would love to hear you expatiate a little about why you think the kinds of spaces you’ve described were evident in SF and not in Silicon Valley. The particulars, of course, are contingent, but perhaps we can discover some “rules of thumb” beyond simple brute density.